After listing to the chatter about wants and such on canvas and having a desire to learn new things and most of all being really cheap, I made new canvas for my boat. I got nearly 12 years out of the original canvas. I have to say some of the features were things I wanted for years, and I am not sure I could have gotten them from a canvas shop.
Big changes:
1. "All" of the windows on the dodger now zip off as separate pieces.
2. Cut away sections for the hand rails (got these from SBO); the old way after I added the hand rails was pretty painful to add or remove canvas or the rails. The great news on this is that with the handholds the dodger frame is now self supporting so I can zip all the windows off for air flow but still have the canvas on top for shade.
3. Side windows are a bit shorter to hopefully avoid entangling with the jib sheets while sailing.
4. Openings in the front side windows for lines running to the clutches re-done to eliminate the zippers in the windows which really never worked well anyway.
5. Extra high opening on the port side window to accommodate the re-done traveler lines now led to the port side to be like "those" newer Catalina's.
6. On the dodger the openings for the backstays were moved forward ~1" to help them better line up.
I still have some tweaking to do as I figure out what details I missed, but I have to give my friend Ray Boisvert a shout out for helping on this. In addition to his Sailrite, which is an awesome machine, he also provided a lot of tips and tricks for how to do things the right way.
Some lessons learned:
1. Always get 3-4 times the amount of binding you think you need. 3/4" and 1" were what we really used as it is flexible. I have a bunch of 2" binding left over that we hardly used.
2. Always get extra zippers, they are cheap. I counted them twice before we started and I still came up short. Most of the time we had to cut them short to get that "custom" fit and sew on our own stoppers.
3. Get the big spool of T90x thread. We used a lot and the big spool was cheap. It would have cost 2x as much to get the little spools, plus I now have a lifetime supply in Captain Navy.
4. The sailrite is a tank. Made everything much easier.
5. Ray's binding attachments really helped in moving the project along when we had to do binding.
Big changes:
1. "All" of the windows on the dodger now zip off as separate pieces.
2. Cut away sections for the hand rails (got these from SBO); the old way after I added the hand rails was pretty painful to add or remove canvas or the rails. The great news on this is that with the handholds the dodger frame is now self supporting so I can zip all the windows off for air flow but still have the canvas on top for shade.
3. Side windows are a bit shorter to hopefully avoid entangling with the jib sheets while sailing.
4. Openings in the front side windows for lines running to the clutches re-done to eliminate the zippers in the windows which really never worked well anyway.
5. Extra high opening on the port side window to accommodate the re-done traveler lines now led to the port side to be like "those" newer Catalina's.
6. On the dodger the openings for the backstays were moved forward ~1" to help them better line up.
I still have some tweaking to do as I figure out what details I missed, but I have to give my friend Ray Boisvert a shout out for helping on this. In addition to his Sailrite, which is an awesome machine, he also provided a lot of tips and tricks for how to do things the right way.
Some lessons learned:
1. Always get 3-4 times the amount of binding you think you need. 3/4" and 1" were what we really used as it is flexible. I have a bunch of 2" binding left over that we hardly used.
2. Always get extra zippers, they are cheap. I counted them twice before we started and I still came up short. Most of the time we had to cut them short to get that "custom" fit and sew on our own stoppers.
3. Get the big spool of T90x thread. We used a lot and the big spool was cheap. It would have cost 2x as much to get the little spools, plus I now have a lifetime supply in Captain Navy.
4. The sailrite is a tank. Made everything much easier.
5. Ray's binding attachments really helped in moving the project along when we had to do binding.
